Before we can ask what is good, we first have to ask what good is.

So this may seem like an asinine distinction, but for those subscribing to non-cognitivism and all of the meta-ethicists for that matter, this was a pertinent question that deserved an entirely separate field of study. Essentially, with ethics the goal is to figure out what things possess the quality of goodness or badness. However, with meta-ethics, the goal is to figure out what it means to be good. You might think back to the Euthyphro dilemma.